Using Software Tools To Provide Students in Large Classes with Individualized Formative Feedback

摘要

Students at the university level spend more and more time in learning management systems (LMSs), which support current teaching by offering online tutorials or units. These LMSs allow individual preparation for the students, especially in large classes. However, students' learning in these online systems is often not supported by detailed formative feedback, as the options for this in current LMSs are quite limited. Formative feedback should be connected with the learning objective or competencies of the course, but formative feedback in an LMS is limited to single tasks or tests and does not allow one to focus on competencies across tasks. We have developed two easy-to-use software tools that enable teachers to use data from the LMS to quickly create an automated formative feedback that can be sent to students. First evaluations of the average final exam scores of different classes show that this new type of formative feedback seems to have a medium-scale effect on students' final exam scores according to Cohen.